Callum Au [Kenny McCracken]
COMPOSER/arranger/trombonist Callum Au’s new double CD Sing Seven Seas is almost a big band manifesto, deploying a multitude of styles to show just what 80 top-class players (including the likes of Mark Nightingle, Ryan Quigley, Lawrence Cottle and Emma Rawicz) can achieve – and it is joyous and fun.
It consists of two parts, Volume One, which gathers music written by Au in his own style, which includes tracks such as Si Vis Pacem Para Carnyx (I think that’s ”if you want peace prepare a carnyx”).
The resurrected carnyx is an iron age war trumpet – which Au and Andy Wood, another top trombonist, play here – and the piece conjures the soundtrack to a great lost Ridley Scott Celtic epic.
I also loved Galt’s Motor, full of slick gear changes, from Maria Schneider-like washes of colour to punchy cinematic brass, leading to a searing guitar solo from Jake Wilson.
The gentler Tethys brings to mind Kenny Wheler, thanks to a lovely flugel-led melody, and jazz.ai, with its snarky narration about the capacity of artificial intelligence to disrupt even jazz, made me smile. The second disc is Au’s more straightforward homage to the big band era – Ellington, Basie and the like.
It might be a blast from the jazz past (albeit with strong contemporary underpinnings, especially in the solos), but even modern ears couldn’t fail to be exhilarated by smoother than silk trumpet and sax sections searing their unison way through the changes, and swinging like it was the 1940s all over again.
My favourite track on Volume Two is probably Changeling, which starts with a moody Chinatown-like noir feel before, as the title suggests, shifting mood and texture and alighting upon some fine trombone work by the leader.
• Sing Seven Seas will be a blast live and you can see it performed at Kings Place on May 30.
See https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/book-tickets/4663/
Olivia Murphy’s Fateful Birds and Fledgling Stories features an 18-piece orchestra [Ellie Koepke]
The second album I have been listening to is also a big band, but a very different proposition from Callum Au’s magnum opus. Fateful Birds and Fledgling Stories is the debut album from composer and bandleader Olivia Murphy. It reveals its intentions subtlety, starting out like a theme from a folk-horror film, before an accretion of instruments reveals the full flavour of the 18-piece orchestra.
Although there are echoes of Gil Evans and Maria Schneider in there, it reminded me of a more British tradition – Dave Holland’s Big Band, say, or Kenny Wheeler’s Music for Large & Small Ensembles (yes, I know he was Canadian, but he was one of ours at heart) and even, in its use of the voices of Becca Wilkins and Rebecka Edlund, the late lamented Keith Tippet’s larger scale works (such as the magnificent folly that was September Energy).
Murphy’s mix of tightly scored and improvised music is bold and ambitious, and you can hear her Olivia Murphy Jazz Orchestra live (and witness Olivia’s distinctive conducting style) at the Pizza Express Soho on May 18.
• Tickets: https://www.pizzaexpresslive.com/whats-on/olivia-murphy-jazz-orchestra
